La Capitale d'Été

This premiere smells and looks heavenly: For the first time, non-members can also take part in one of the social highlights of the Baden-Baden festival year. The start of the summer festival brings encounters with music and culinary surprises in one of the most beautiful gardens in the country. The Munich Harmonists recall the hits of the 1920s and the party enjoys the eve of “Yannick-Time”.

An opening program with international flair – with music from France, Finland, and Canada. Composer Barbara Assiginaak draws from the traditions of the Canadian Anishinabe in her works. In his Second Symphony, Sibelius pays tribute to his Finnish homeland. And the Frenchmen Ravel and Saint-Saëns travel in their imagination. With La Valse, Ravel composed a portrait of the city of Vienna, while Saint-Saëns paid homage to both the German Baroque and Italian folk dance in his Second Piano Concerto.

Silence and excess. This is the concept of the "Silent Disco," one of the most exciting (yet relaxing) pop-cultural phenomena of our time. Dancers dance to disco music. That much is widely known. However, the groovers wear headphones, offering the observer in the Baden-Baden spa garden a dancing pantomime. A fascinating experience for everyone who wants to have fun dancing in the World Heritage City without disturbing the surrounding environment and early sleepers.

A summer opera gala needs Mozart's lightness, Verdi's, Puccini's and Mascagni's somewhat lusher southern flavour and French esprit. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, New York's Metropolitan Opera star Lisette Oropesa and the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal bring precisely this mixture to the Baden-Baden Summer Festival. Excerpts from operas such as ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, ‘La Traviata’ and ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ will be combined with French opera gems that inspire all the senses.

The Mozart operas he has presented at the Festspielhaus have all been released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon. Now Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct the master's Requiem and his best-known symphony. The mysteriously masked man who commissioned the Requiem has contributed much to the building of legends. The composer writing a funeral mass on his own deathbed… this fateful overlap went on to become the ending and highlight of the celebrated film Amadeus by Hollywood director Milos Forman.

At the chamber music concerts with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his musician friends, you can get closer to the artists than ever before. The event will take place in the Weinbrennersaal, which Nézet-Séguin finds especially inspiring: Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, and friends once made music together here like a family. The evening will feature a program to match: Schumann's Piano Quartet, whose slow movement is some of the most beautiful music composed in the Romantic era. As always, conductor Nézet-Séguin will also step on stage as a pianist. Afterwards we will hear Mozart songs.

Research shows that even before we are born, we can hear pretty well and even develop a taste for music. This makes it all the more important for things to continue in this direction right after birth. Toddler’s concerts for babies and small children have now become a concert fixture. And yet they are always very special occasions for young ears. 

Bring on the timpani and trumpets! The last concert of the Summer Festival opens with Mozart's "Jupiter” Symphony, whose final movement impressed later composers at least as much as that of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. If Mozart's "Jupiter" radiates light, his C minor Mass casts many a shadow. Which is why, in Mozart’s oeuvre, this unfinished choral work is the secret favorite of many music lovers – and powerful enough for an unforgettable finale.